A room of one's own : the author and the reader in the text

Abstract

The self-sufficiency to which postmodemist fictions aspire does not imply the denial of facts or a refusal to incorporate them within their borderlines. But it aims to subsume facts under the head of fictionality. And in order to ensure the special status necessary for fiction to justify this subsumption of facts, the fictional text can no longer rely on its immanent aesthetic value. In a world where texts tend to be commentaries on one another, the postmodemist novel attempts to regain an independent status by fictionalizing the authorreader relationship to the point where the factual relationship between author and reader becomes irrelevant. This fictionalization, as a permutation of the relationship from actual interdependence to a mode of self-sufficiency, is achieved by changing the temporal sequence of writing and reading into the spatial concept of an erotic relationship between author and reader. And this form of spatialization once more supplies the novel with the ideal necessary to overreach itself.